Social signals and SEO

Maintaining a successful social media presence can be difficult as it requires regular posting and engagement with your audience. Platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter allow for a high level of brand awareness, helping raise a barristers chamber’s profile. Although Google has stated that they do not crawl social media sites to add weight your SEO, there are a number of best practices that if followed, will benefit your chamber’s website.

A good social media strategy should be built around releasing high-quality content in order to attract your audience. When a good social strategy is interlinked with a content marketing and SEO strategy, you have potential to improve the reach of your social media efforts and search rankings. What’s more, an interlinked strategy between the SEO, content marketing and social media can help naturally attract more visitors to the website.

Content Marketing

Building high quality, natural links should still be an important part of your SEO strategy. This is where a content marketing strategy can work in order to increase the visibility of your chamber’s website.

Once you have created a good piece of content which has been published on your website, you can then share a link to the content across your social media platforms. As users are gradually directed to your website from the content link on social media, they will encourage Google’s bots to crawl the pages.

As more people share your social media posts and you get more click throughs to each piece of content, Google will monitor the increasing levels of traffic. If levels of retention are also good this will signal that it is a piece of credible content. Distributing quality content written for each audience you want to target through social platforms will help establish each page and more gradually your website, as a source of credible content.

Take a look at our blog post on making the most out of your content marketing to ensure that it can direct as much traffic as possible through to your chamber’s website.

Social Media Profiles

When deciding which social profiles to be active on, you need to consider which ones you are going to be able to manage and publish content on. It is important to carefully select your platforms so that they can each be easily maintained and kept active.

Social media profiles appear in the search engine results, which means that each of your profiles should be kept up to date with regular content being shared for your audience to view.

Social Media Followers

Google has stated that is doesn’t use social media following counts as a signal to its search rankings as social media follower counts are a factor that can not be completely confirmed as credible. This means that your chamber’s twitter and facebook pages cannot be crawled by Google as they cannot provide an accurate evaluation of the page authority due to lack of information.

Google has made it clear that they are very cautious using social platforms as a ranking factor for the search results. While your chamber’s social media profiles are unreliable in their signal to Google, they still bring great SEO benefits in terms of their use in Content Marketing, helping to direct traffic back to your chamber’s website.